Add a button for "I wouldn't pay for this search"

danny

Since each search costs Kagi and the user money, Kagi needs a feedback loop to help it better learn what's a valuable query and what's not. Then attempt to piece together a common theme. For example, are there things that developers commonly search for that aren't valuable to do a full cost query? Those are cost optimization opportunities for heavy users.

DDG !bangs acted as a feedback signal for DDG. Every time a user adds "!g" to the query, that's a feedback signal that the search quality might not be good enough.

This suggestion is not about getting signals on search quality, but rather whether user feels that the query is worth spending $0.0125 on. Currently Kagi has no idea and no feedback loop for this. It's full cost query all the time and for all users.

So adding a button to allow users to provide that feedback would help Kagi figure out how to provide cheaper cost for certain queries.

If there are worries that non-heavy users might get confused, then maybe in the settings introduce an "Advanced" mode where settings like this could show up.

z64

We do have a feedback loop: this forum 🙂

We have served many reports of search quality feedback over our time in public beta. The problem with a low effort "report" button, is that in almost every case we needed to ask the user questions to find out exactly what they were looking for. If we had guessed, it probably would of been wrong - everyone has a different perspective and expectation, and sometimes it takes some discussion to get to the bottom of it.

If users just sent us "downvotes" instead, it would not be helpful. Kagi's quality would be much less than it is today, and it would be an even harder product to sell. We could add a text field, or a drop-down of misc. descriptors ("Spam results", "Irrelevant to my keywords"), but this is only a piece of the information we need, if they even fill it out.

Those who do end up taking the time to open a report often leads very high quality discussions of important issues (they felt moved enough to open a report, it must be important...)

The idea of course is a good one - but in our experience the it feels like the best bet is to instead make steps to optimize opening this line of dialog, such as somehow linking your account here (automatically creating one?) and automatically fill out a template post.

erik

z64 I came here because I wanted to suggest the opposite, a praise button for queries that surprised me by being unusually good. Here is an example: https://kagi.com/search?q=%22implicitly+has+type+%27any%27+because+it+does+not+have+a+type+annotation+and+is+referenced+directly+or+indirectly+in+its+own+initializer%22+%22rtk-query%22

Would that be covered by the same reasoning?

Normally what I would do would be to mention it on Twitter, but since results aren't visible for most Twitter users that probably would be confusing.

z64

erik That's cool, thanks for sharing!

It could be helpful, but probably only from a marketing perspective, for us to review for results that users really like. Just my guess though.

Share on Twitter

If you press the "More" button on the search header, there is a button to copy a public link to that query. Anyone can then use that link without an account to test that query themselves 😄

Grooty

Yeah I think a share button for good searches would be a good idea. At least one that is more prominent and not just hidden in the bottom of the page.

z64

Grooty I was referring to the existing button:

Grooty

z64 Ah my bad, I totally forgot it was also there. The one I was referring to was at the bottom of the search results: